Conference centre-athletic-multiple purpose facility for the local community, within the Ziridis school complex at Spata Attica. (1998-2001)
This large building with ambitious functional programme was requested by the school owners in response to various requests by the local municipal authorities and the financial advisors of the school.
Due to demanding requirements the extensive building was to ingeniously utilize the natural inclination of the ground to permit access to the lower level while the building is essentially only one-storey height from the northern side, thus enabling such a demanding function to be implemented in a low-rise building to match local restrictions for out-of-town building.
Athletes entrance from the south, main visitors entrance from the west, and safety egress exits at the eastern corners for safety, appropriately from the middle level of the seating. Auxiliary spaces for various uses planned accordingly.
Conceptually, the large enclosure was of course covered with a space-frame but the concept was, contrary with common practices for such buildings, to dress the elevations with solid bricks and plaster in a solid, historical symbolic fashion to make the building more compatible with the rest of the building complex and its finishing materials, to create an atmosphere of ‘roman’ like Mediterranean solid structure within appropriately selected Mediterranean vegetation, as opposed to a high-tech glass and steel construction incompatible with the Ziridis overall school complex and the symmetrically placed nursery school at the other lower extremity of the complex.
It is unfortunate that this building too (always building 14, regardless of the various more or less minor changes in its function), was eventually not implemented at the latest stage due to financial constraints which made the construction of several of the most critical balancing buildings of the Ziridis complex, unsustainable from a financial viewpoint.